Facilitating Smallholder Farmers’ Market Access
In the OIC Member Countries
137
Engage in Technical Cooperation
No “silver bullet” exists to link smallholder farmers to markets. The policies and
interventions that succeed in forging those links will be shaped by a particular country's
current position in the process of structural transformation, its endowments, both natural
and man-made, and by where the country is heading. Nevertheless, OIC member countries
have much to gain from sharing first-hand experiences with strategies that successfully
linked smallholders to markets, as well as strategies that failed. Two particularly
important areas for technical cooperation are to better understand how to foster effective
producer organizations and how to establish effective platforms for consultation and
collaboration across the public sector, agribusiness, producer groups, and innovation-
driven agencies. Evidence indicates that it is often easier to form producer organizations
than it is to make them financially viable and sustainable. Issues that warrant attention
include the identification of appropriate internal governance arrangements and strategies
to strengthen the links between producer organizations and national agricultural and
research systems and between producer organizations and actors downstream in the
value chain. Identifying mechanisms for resolving disputes effectively and building
producer organizations’ capacity to use those mechanisms will also have strong payoffs.
Platforms for consultation and collaboration can provide many benefits as they link the
public and private sectors, producer organizations, and other stakeholders to facilitate
knowledge sharing and address policy and other shared issues related to a particular
commodity.